Slashdot Mirror
Ray Kurzweil's Vision of the Singularity, In Movie Form
destinyland writes "AI researcher Ben Goertzel peeks at the new Ray Kurzweil movie (Transcendent Man), and
gives it 'two nano-enhanced cyberthumbs way, way up!' But in an exchange with Kurzweil after the screening, Goertzel debates the
post-human future, asking whether individuality can survive in a machine-augmented brain.
The documentary covers radical futurism, but also includes alternate viewpoints.
'Would I build these machines, if I knew there was a strong chance they would destroy humanity?' asks evolvable hardware researcher Hugo de Garis. His answer? 'Yeah.'" Note, the movie is about Kurzweil and futurism, not by Kurzweil. Update: 05/06 20:57 GMT by T : Note, Singularity Hub has a review up, too.
... we'll be wrong. My own theory is that strong AI is the ultimate weapon and that it will never ever fall into the hands of the likes of you and me. Whether the machines get out of control is irrelevant; eventually the parties that control them will be slugging it out with weapons powerful enough to make life here hardly worth living. I expect to be dead before then, thankfully. But remember the first sentence of this post.
I doubt anyone else could even sell this shit as a sci-fi B-movie plot.
Often, nay consistently, life seems to mimic a shitty sci-fi B-movie plot.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
..this story falls in the category of "sh#t that's never gonna happen".
You just got troll'd!
The key here is that Ray bases this prediction on past observation of things like Moore's law. Even though he does cherry pick and that there is no guarantee that it would always continue in such a fashion, the idea that distributed system improvements are exponential isn't that far fetched.
So basically what he is saying is that if the future behaves like the past then we will see so major changes shortly simply because we'll have processing out the wazoo.
Even the Moore himself thinks this will at least last til 2018 when silicon transistors reach their theoretical limit on the atomic scale. Whether or not the industry finds a suitable replacement for silicon or finds another way to go about making processors is another thing all together.
My bet is that Intel, IBM, and AMD are putting the big bucks on getting past the silicon limit because that is their money cow.
So if the limit does continue that things like Blue Brain Project will have an easier time running their simulations.
I don't know about the whole Nanotech emergence, but at least it looks like we might get the AI thing solved in at least 50 years.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I just saw an interview with him last night, where he discussed full power computers the size of a blood cell, us mapping out our minds for the good of all, etc. It reminded me of the utopian 1950s vision of the space age, where we'd all be floating around space circa 2001: Its not going to happen.
First he's ignoring some physical limitations, such as with the size of computers, but that's not even the main issue. The main issue is that he's ignoring politics. He's ignoring the fact that technologies which comes into existence get used by existing power structures to perpetuate their rule, not necessarily "for the good of all". Mind reading technology he predicts won't be floating around for everybody to play with, it will be used by intelligence agencies to prop of regimes which will scan the brains of potential opposition, consolidating their rule. Quantum computers, given their code breaking potential, won't be in public hands either, but rather will strengthen surveillance operations of those who already do this stuff.
In other words, this technology won't make the past go away any more than the advent of the atom bomb made middle ages Islamic mujahadeen go away. Rather it will combine with current political realities to accentuate the ancient political realities of haves and have not that date back to ancient times.
-The art of programming is the pursuit of absolute simplicity.
for my Moravec transfer. Although the more I think about it, I'm not sure that perceptible continuity of consciousness is such a big deal. I mean, I go to sleep every night and wake up the next day believing and feeling that I'm the same person that went to sleep. If there were a cutover to digital representation while I was "asleep" (i.e. unaware), I'm not sure I'd mind the thought of my organic representation being destroyed, even if it could have continued existence in parallel.
Computers become smarter than humans. Human consciousness becomes downloadable ...ermm ...somehow... and we live forever as computers.
The sad part is that it seems like it's all wishful thinking on Kurzweil's part who's really scared of dying. So my bet is that his outlandish and baseless predictions are so popular because it fills a void in the "don't worry you won't really die" department that religions used to fill. So the whole Singularity thing really is a secular techno-cult of some sort, and Kurzweil is the guru and prophet.
You just got troll'd!
Consciousness is an instantaneous phenomenon and there is no continuity of "self".
However, just because something ("Consciousness" in this case) is emergent and cannot be well described by the sum of the parts doesn't mean we shouldn't at least consider what these sorts of human/machine interfaces might do to our perception of self in the future if ever they exist.
My prediction: as long as I can still enjoy a fine single malt - and some bacon from time to time I'll consider the future a smashing success.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
"The nerd rapture"
Mike Judge's vision of the future in "Idiocracy" seems much more likely.
On the issue of whether computer-enhanced humans are still "human" - what does that even mean? Genetically, "Human" is 98% chimpanzee, 50% dog, 30% daffodil, etc. (I'm sure I have the numbers wrong).
I think we tend to over-rate the concept of "humanity". Every thought or emotion you've ever had is merely your impression of sodium ions moving around in your brain. We process information. Computers do it. Chimpanzees do it. Dogs do it. Even daffodils do it. It is just not that special.
"Individuality" is an illusion. You may process information differently than I do. But you also process information at time x differently than you process information at time x+1. Because the "human" self is a manifestation of the brain, the human "self" changes with each thought. Consciousness is an instantaneous phenomenon and there is no continuity of "self". In effect, we have all "died" an infinite number of times.
That's a bit overboard, I think. You're basically claiming (and I'm trying not to strawman you, here) that abstract concepts can't be used to identify patterns, but instead can only be used to identify identical things. There's plenty of reason for me to label myself at time=2009 and myself at time=2007 the same person, just as we label anything else that changes but maintains identifiable and distinct patterns.
As a scientist, individual identity seems like a common and accurate label for each person's idiosyncratic tendencies.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Moore's law is fundamentally flawed in that it predicts a never ending exponential (linear in the log domain) progression. It is bound to slow down and eventually stop, yet it fails entirely to take that into account.
What I think is that instead of being linear (well, actually exponential) it's more like a Gaussian function (a bell-shaped curve). It started far in the negatives, and now we're getting closer to the centre and its maximum, so we're feeling the slow down, and eventually it'll crawl to a halt. Although maybe it won't and then it'd be more like another function, the point being, it can't go on exponentially like this forever.
All of this being said, I think that Kurzweil's predictions are not flawed in that we'll have a tough time accessing the necessary hardware, but it's more theoretical, we have no fucking clue how we'd make any of that happen, right now it's a problem of theory and algorithms, not of computer power. We know better how to make time travel happen than how to make strong AI pop up.
You just got troll'd!
I aree with what you've said to a point. But consciousnesses don't mingle (at least, mine hasn't...), our consciousness remains locked to our individual brains and perception. If we do any sort of human brain networking, that could change. And that would be mind-bendingly weird.
> If Robert is 700 part Ultimate Brain and 1 part Robert; and ... i.e., ... then, in what sense
> Ray is 700 parts SuperiorBrain and 1 part Ray
> if the human portions of the post-Singularity cyborg beings
> are minimal and relatively un-utilized
> will these creatures really be human?
> In what sense will they really be Robert and Ray?
IMO, as long as there are enough cycles to run the 'ego subroutines' from the original bioform then the same sense of self will be maintained.
It's when these original 'ego subroutines' (which will be a line item in process accounting) are altered will be see a fundamental changing of the human that was.
There will be add-ons to the 'ego subroutines' just like there are add-ons to firefox.
You will cure your fear of spiders or have access to pleasure centers with a simple mod.
You perhaps forget that virtually all human advancement begins with 'wishful thinking'. This is a scientific problem. You have a human consciousness. In a secular, materialistic worldview, a human consciousness is nothing special. It's basically assumed to be nothing more than really obfuscated software running on a biological, carbon-based computer. Given that assumption, it is a natural step to find some way to copy it, intact and functioning, to a more resilient inorganic, silicon-based computer. The difference between this and all the various soul-based afterlife nonsense of religions should be obvious to anybody. This is a potentially plausible objective hypothetical physical/material process. It's an idea based on hard facts that may actually work given enough research, testing, and further advances in hardware and software design.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Kurzweil's predictions aren't just based on modern trends but historical shifts as well. In fact, I thought one of the big pieces he shows is a graph of 'paradigm shifting events' against time. These would be technologies that changed everything at the time; things like agriculture, the printing press, nuclear power, the transistor, etc.
The point isn't the gradual improvement of transistor technology that make the singularaty interesting, it's that transistors will be old news in 20 years; replaced by some new technology that we can't even speculate about right now. It's about the shifts, not the gradual evolution.
That's a bit overboard, I think. You're basically claiming (and I'm trying not to strawman you, here) that abstract concepts can't be used to identify patterns, but instead can only be used to identify identical things. There's plenty of reason for me to label myself at time=2009 and myself at time=2007 the same person, just as we label anything else that changes but maintains identifiable and distinct patterns.
As a scientist, individual identity seems like a common and accurate label for each person's idiosyncratic tendencies
No, don't destroy my plan for the perfect crime.
"Unfortunately, the entity that killed him ceased to exist the instant after the murder occured."
I, well the guy that just said I a moment ago, except I meant me, no not that me, this me now...
*bolts and runs for the door*
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Actually, I'm pretty sure with time travel I could fairly trivially build about the strongest AI possible. When you can perform an infinite number of operations in an arbitrarily short amount of time, quite a stupid algorithm can produce some pretty smart results.
Better review at Singularity Hub I think (but I am biased): http://singularityhub.com/2009/04/29/transcendent-man-wows-at-tribeca-film-festival-premier/
"The nerd rapture"
I always thought of it more as a techno-rapture and that's the way I've seen it referred to in other places.
Even the most committed atheist can understand the attraction of religion and the idea of a rapture and a heaven, life everlasting. These are all very human yearnings. The difference between the idea of the religious and the techo-rapture is that the means of making it happen lie within our grasp. Certainly we could create the new heaven and new Earth and the reign of a thousand years right here and now. We have the technology, we have the knowledge, what we lack is the wisdom.
The poster who compares it with 1950's futurist utopianism is exactly right. We could have had the future depicted in 2001, we could have an end to world hunger, an end to disease, and if not an end to death then a comfortably long delay in its arrival. The problem is that we're still very human at heart and humans are not that far removed from the trees. We are selfish, grasping, petty animals and those few acts of sublime virtue from the best of us simply serve to make the rest of us look all the worse.
We've yet to develop a political system adequate to the task of promoting the greatest good for the greatest number without allowing unhealthy power and influence to be amassed by our least deserving fellows. Unfortunately, the very people who are most willing to acquire power are seldom the ones who should have it. The complaint I hear from my friends deeply involved with the Democrats is that there are plenty of good people they'd like to run as candidates but so many of them want nothing to do with politics. They're happy to put in the long hours behind the scenes but the thought of being in the spotlight and having all the attention on them is about as attractive a thought as a root canal. Someone actually willing to take that kind of attention is more than likely going to be someone like a John Edwards, a nice smile and slick approach but ultimately a self-serving jerk so blinded by his own awesomeness that he'd pull stupid shit like having an affair and then throwing his hat in the ring for the presidency.
I'm curious as to what the potential implication of a Singularity is for technology but I don't know if that would change the human situation all that much. There's been some good speculative fiction written along these lines in the Orion's Arm universe. It's trying to be a very hard SF look at future space opera. The few aliens are all completely inhuman, the humanoid aliens are actually all modified people from earth, terragen life as they call it. There's various scales that sophonts fall onto from sub-human to AI gods and all sorts of tech levels from stone-age to planck-age. It's certainly worth a look.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
The whole philosophy seems to smack of undying narcissism. It's ok to fear death; it's part of western culture, and key to survival. As we experience life individually and only marginally as a collective (civility as bad as it is), it's understandable that living forever seems like a good idea. We're here as an accident of our birth. Disembodied, we might evolve, but we're not designed for 400 years of life. Who knows what kind of cyber-insanity might evolve. I'm leaving it up to my kids to figure it out, as it was left up to me to figure it out.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
He's talking about genetic enhancement, nano technology, robotics, AI and more.
And you "only" need one of these to reach a critical level for the Singularity to occur.
For instance:
*Genetically enhance humans to be better at genetically enhancing humans, rinse and repeat.
*Make strong AI capable of creating stronger AI, etc
I recommend his book "The Singularity Is Near".
Free preview at google: http://books.google.com/books?id=88U6hdUi6D0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=kurzweil#PPA19,M1
His website has some interesting stuff, including opposing points of view.
http://www.kurzweilai.net/
Since there are physical limits involved, it would intuitively seem vastly more plausible to suggest that the improvements would, in the long term, be logistic rather than exponential (and, of course, a logistic growth curve looks, in its early phase, just like an exponential curve.)
Of course, a logistic curve could still support predictions of a "singularity" of sorts, the difference is that things would "settle down" to a new normal after an abrupt transformation, rather than continuing with accelerating change forever.
Look at it this way, when I read the newspaper (or rather, the news website) and see words like "as a result of the accident, the child will be blind for the rest of his life". The first thing that pops into my head is that he won't be blind for the rest of his life, he'll be blind until we find a way to give him his sight back.
If the kid lost his retina, we can already fix that to some extent with a transplant. If the kid had his optic nerve destroyed, that might be a couple years for us to fix, maybe even a decade. If the kid the part of his brain the processes images, maybe it'll take 40 years, but I have no doubt we'll eventually be able to do it.
Now, how are any of our diseases any different? If you can't imagine an implantable artificial heart being available within 20 years, you have very little faith in our progress. Sure, the other organs are going to be trickier, but can you really think of a valid reason that each and every one of them (except the brain) can't be replaced by an artificial version assuming the technology is advanced enough? Alzheimer's (and mental senescence in general) is about the only thing that might not be fixable from a strictly mechanical point of view and we're even getting closer to understanding those issues.
So tell me, logically, why it's impossible. I'll grant that it probably won't happen any time soon. I'll maybe even grant that society won't let it happen since immortality would cause pretty drastic changes to our culture and our planet. But I won't grant that it is technologically impossible.
What the hell do the trees look like where you live? They sound like they'd scare the *shit* out of me.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
So his argument boils down to: "Lots of cool stuff has happened in the past. If we extrapolate, then OMG ponies!!!!!"
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
With minor paraphrasing, you pose the question "what if everything is impossible?"
That's the stupidest question in the history of all luddites. Even if--and that's a massive if--it is provably infeasible to simulate an entire human, the research will be unimaginably valuable to any human. Brain prosthetics, broadband mind/machine interface, and safe treatments to target specific brain disorders are only the tiniest wedge of the foreseeable advances that sort of research can provide.
Lastly, what "hardware limitations" can you be citing? Moore's law has held for the entire length of CPU development, and there's no indication for it to be slowing now. (hint: Moore's law has nothing to do with GHz) If silicon fails, there are dozens of technologies being tested to replace it.
With all the problems you're inventing, I have only one question for you: What are you afraid of?
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
Not exactly. He says, cool stuff is getting more and more frequent.
And this isn't just about human discoveries, it is observable in evolution of life as well.
And that's what makes it scary, what if we were not the first :)
Then definitely we won't be the last.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
It gets more complicated when myself2030 and myself2032 are standing side by side. If myself2030 kills Joe Smith, and then commits suicide, is myself2032 partially responsible? 100%? 0%. With no legal link between selves, when a copy of myself can be made for $100, then murder-suicide of government officials, political people you disagree with becomes easy to do, and when your copy plans on suiciding makes it difficult to protect agent.
No, his argument is that lots of cool stuff happened in the past, and the cool stuff is happening more and more rapidly as time goes on. Basically, each major 'cool thing' that happens increases the amount of processing power being used to solve the next problem and create the next cool thing.
Agriculture led to a massive population increase that in turn led to more human beings working to solve problems. Iron tools reduced the time it took to do tasks and freed up more time for other pursuits. The printing press led to the education of vast numbers of people who would otherwise have remained ignorant. Computers aid research in ways that no one could have imagined 70 years ago.
If you grant that progress is happing at an accellerating rate, there comes a time in the future where things change dramatically in very short periods of time. If you chose to call that point "OMG ponnies!!!!!" so be it.
This is going to take a while.
Re-engineering biological systems takes generations to debug. And a huge number of dud individuals during the development process. This is fine for tomato R&D, but generating a big supply of failed post-humans is going to be unpopular. Just extending the human lifespan is likely to take generations to debug. It takes a century to find out if something worked.
AIs and robots don't have that problem.
What I suspect is going to happen is that we're going to get good AIs and robots, but they won't be cheaper than people. Suppose that an AI smarter than humans can be built, but it's the size of a server farm. In that case, the form the "singularity" may take is not augmented humans, but augmented corporations. The basic problem with companies is that no one person has the whole picture. But a machine could. If this happens, the machines will be in charge, simply because the machines can communicate and organize better.
You remind me of a popular adage... any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Perhaps any sufficiently advanced technology is also indistinguishable from God.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
He abuses the hockey stick phenomenon.
He also overlooks many, many practical matters.
The man hasn't done jack in over 20 years.
"Futurist" is another word for "has been"
"it's that transistors will be old news in 20 years; "
no, they won't. Do you even know what a transistor is?
Also gone in 20 years resistors and capacitors! weeee
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"..begins with 'wishful thinking'."
yes, but so does all humans crappy ideas.
It doesn't mean it can happen.
For example: All the wishful thinking in the world won't make homeopathy work.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I agree. It may be sad and creepy, but the really bad part of it is that he apparently lacks any kind of understanding of what actually makes up the mind of a person. A mind is not the sum of epiphenomenal output data.
Sure, you can try to simulate something that is more or less likely to give you responses similar to known input patterns, but that is not what constitutes a person.
What you could then do to make it a person is feed that list of "expectations" into some kind of default brain, thereby filling in the many blanks with an actual neurological structure that can perform real cognition and exhibit consciousness. BUT - and here's the essence of the problem - all you did in the end was to create a new person that exhibits some of the traits of the dead person. In no way or form has the dead guy come back to life.
I think modeling and then enslaving an AI to perform like your long-dead father is morally questionable at best. It shows that in the end he has no regard for neither the beloved person who regretfully ceased to exist nor for the new slave entity that is forced to perform a perpetual make-believe job on his behalf.
Scientifically, the problem is entropy and the passage of time. Everything needed to "run" the entity that was his father is lost to decay and cannot be restored - barring a way to accurately retrieve molecular structures from arbitrary points in the past.
Yes but his argument is still flawed even if you refine it slightly. There are many problems with his assumption, but even one is enough to derail it:
Assume that each previous advance multiplies the amount of result for a given effort. You only get accelerating returns when the growth in required effort is below a critical threshold. For certain previous advances, and certain successive problems this has been true.
It does not imply that it always holds, or that it will continue to hold in the future, or even that it holds for any particular problem. "OMG ponies!" doesn't refer to any amount of progress - it refers to a lack of understanding of what a given problem is, and how much effort is required. Perhaps Arthur C. Clarke phrased it better when he called it magic.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
I think we'd know now if another technology would supplant the transistor within 10 years. Indeed, our progress may slow as we approach this limit, i.e. Moore's law will slow down and 2018 is too soon. Evolution frequently just stops within domain, like how marsupials just can't evolve flippers. But that doesn't mean evolution stops overall.
We have massive room for progress in numerous disciplines :
1) language & compiler design -- You can buy 10x performance improvements by rewriting your OS & libraries in structured or object oriented self modifying code, Henry Massalin's Synthesis kernel proved this. You can also rewrite all the other heavy apps using this hypothetical language.
2) algorithms -- You can always just train more scientists and mathematicians to write more & better parallel algorithms. You may also fold these advancements back into compiler design for high level language compilers, like say Haskell.
3) subsidies redirection -- You can redirect all government subsidies towards helping young but solid technologies catch up, underwriting 1/2 the cost of optical fabs for example. How much money gets waisted on farmers now?
4) smarter people -- You can try making smarter people through genetic engineering, pharmacology, and even research into education.
5) augmented people -- You can definitely augment people to improve specific tasks. If you augment children, you might change even more, like their will to do science.
6) clustered people -- You can make neurologically linked "people clusters" who think together towards some common goal, enabling you to solve harder math & science problems.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
This is why you *don't* let nerds make political decisions. We can't resist making new gizmos, even if they eat humanity. It's like letting B. Clinton pick interns.
Table-ized A.I.
I would argue that if reincarnation is real, it underscores, not undermines, the possibility of transferring consciousness. If the natural/supernatural world does it already, than doing it artificially may again just be a matter of process.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
> If we were able to bring back a Neanderthal and he grew up in the lab interacting with scientists and a surrogate mother who would, of course, still be a human being, we'd probably appear more god-like than as simple father and mother figures. We have mysterious magic machines whose workings would be beyond him, move in mysterious ways.
Huh? You're not making any sense now. People a thousand years ago would find our machines magical too, but if we were to clone one of those people and raise them like a normal person in our time, there is no reason why such a person wouldn't accept (and understand) technology like everybody else does. Likewise, although your hypothetical neanderthal may have below-average intelligence, there is no reason to believe he would would worship our technology any more than a person with Down syndrome. If we assume he'd merely have below average intelligence without being retarded, the cloned neanderthal would probably own an iPod and enjoy it very much, even though he could never understand how it works (just like most humans).
How you view technology has to do with your culture, not with the time period your DNA comes from.
> For example: All the wishful thinking in the world won't make homeopathy work.
Actually that's exactly what makes it 'work'. I agree with your point, but the placebo effect kinda undermines your example.
The waking state is so inefficient from a reproductive and safety perspective that it's mind-boggling.
Consider this question. How long would you live in the wild, if you never woke up?
20 years ago, I had a disagreement with my then biophysics prof when I advocated the use of large networks of PC clusters for studying protein folding and interactions. His line of argument was effectively that I had a lack of understanding of what the problem is, and how much effort is required. Today companies like Zymeworksspecialize in performing that kind of work for pharmaceutical companies on a contract basis. They use quantum chemistry simulations running on small clusters of commodity hardware to do it. Yeah, computing speed has gone through a few orders of magnitude from the 16 MHz 386's of the time to the 2GHz quad cores of today. Fundamentally though, my vision was correct.
20 years ago I remember watching a show that was one of the first sounding the alarm about Climate Change. Back then I was cautiously sceptical because of the crudeness of the models possible with the computing power then available; these days, I'm convinced. It's good to be sceptical, but it's also good to remember that there's more than one way to skin a cat.
When it comes to Arthur C. Clarke quotes, I like the following one at least as much:
The one likely exception to that is that we probably won't ever come up with a way to travel faster than light. Otherwise, there's a lot more I told you so's coming down the pipe. 'Cause, no offense meant, but you probably don't even have the success record and credibility of "a distinguished but elderly scientist".
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Indeed, the sad thing is (well, yet another of those sad things), you can't hear about the Singularity without hearing about Kurzweil, you can't hear about Strong AI (which may or may not be possible, what do we know?) without hearing of the Singularity, and you can't discuss AI without strong AI popping up.
So at the centre of this entire field of research you have that guy and his crazy ideas hogging up all the attention, and I'm afraid that he's only going to bring discredit to the discipline, just like any other discipline that has crackpots as figureheads, and that's no good.
You just got troll'd!
Machines have deprived millions of people of a decent living under their own control.
Oh good grief. Machines and technology in general are the only reason any of us have a "decent living" in the first place.
The initial promise of machines was that they would free us from the drudgery of work, but all they have done is make us work in boring jobs
As opposed to the hotbed of excitement in subsistence farming? Well, I suppose there's a certain thrill in finding out each week whether or not you're going to starve.
So tell me again about how the Luddites were wrong.
Because your romanticized version of the past never existed.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Kurzweil's theory and predictions are predicated on the idea that we have no soul, that we are essentially very complicated biological machines with the illusion of sentience. If he is correct, then you are correct: it will be technologically feasible someday to upload ourselves. If on the other hand we DO have a soul, then all his predictions go out the window and a whole NEW slew of problems arise. Such as: how exactly did we end up with an indestructible self-aware essence that defies the laws of thermodynamics? And... what exactly created it? The way I look at it, the entire history of mankind can be boiled down to the dualistic philosophical question: do we have a soul or not? If we do not have souls, then the universe is a harsh, dark mistress, there is no God, and all we see is all there really is. If however we do have souls, then boy do we have problems. Because if we have souls, then we open up the door to the distinct possibility of a deity, or deities, and that our actions do matter because there is an afterlife. And (this is really scary) there might really be entities like Cthlulu out there in the void. That's IF we have souls though (defining a soul as an indestructible self-aware essence that defies the laws of thermodynamics). Given that, I can see why people would prefer to believe that we are machines and that we should work on uploading ourselves as intelligent programs. There's nothing in the dark we'd have to fear save ourselves then.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
The difference between the idea of the religious and the techo-rapture is that the means of making it happen lie within our grasp... We have the technology, we have the knowledge, what we lack is the wisdom.
No, they aren't in our grasp, they aren't even close to being in our grasp. They're no more in our grasp than transmutation of lead into gold was within the grasp of alchemists -- we can describe conceptually what we would like to happen (we mix chemicals, lead turns to gold; we download our minds into a machine, get rid of our bodies), but can't say how it actually would work. Forget the technological problems involved, even if we could solve every technological hurdle instantly we still couldn't do it because we can't even say what it is we need because we don't even know what it is that makes a mind a mind. Forget wisdom, we aren't even close to having either the knowledge.
The poster who compares it with 1950's futurist utopianism is exactly right. We could have had the future depicted in 2001, we could have an end to world hunger, an end to disease, and if not an end to death then a comfortably long delay in its arrival. The problem is that we're still very human at heart and humans are not that far removed from the trees. We are selfish, grasping, petty animals and those few acts of sublime virtue from the best of us simply serve to make the rest of us look all the worse.
We could end world hunger, because we produce enough food to feed everyone, and in that case the issues are merely political. There's no mystery, no hypothetical unnamed technological advance needed. Just the ability to get the food over here to the hungry person over there.
We have conquered many, many diseases, and have what anyone from more than a century ago would call a comfortably long delay in death's arrival. But on the other hand, this is mostly in pushing up the average, not extending the maximum. Whatever it is that is necessary to get humans to reliably live to 120 or more, we simply don't know yet.
We could have some aspects of the world of 2001, like a manned mission to Jupiter's moons if we really wanted to, but not others, like HAL. Why? Because despite many, many people working on the problem we still have no idea how to make HAL. It's not a matter of lacking the technology, we lack the conceptual understanding of what we're trying to accomplish. And throwing more people at the task wouldn't necessarily solve that. There's lots of interesting work in the Strong AI field, and maybe we'll make the necessary unknown breakthrough. Maybe we won't.
So yeah, it's exactly like 1950s futurist utopianism in that it is highly speculative, and makes wild guesses about what unknown and unknowable advances will be made, some of which will end up coming to pass, others will end up being complete wishful thinking, and others will end up somewhere in between.
Look, I get Kurzweil's basic idea. Major paradigm-shifting advances, things the people beforehand couldn't have even conceived of, keep coming faster and faster. If this trend continues... aaaayyyyy!
That's all well and good, but the thing about these advances the people beforehand couldn't have even conceived of is that you don't get to pick which ones are feasible and will happen. That's kinda the nature of the inconceivable. Whatever the future brings, it could be completely different than what you think, and it could end up that what you wish for the future is impossible, but other things beyond your imagination come to pass.
Look at the alchemists again. It turns out, thanks to advances they could not have conceived of, that transmutation of lead into gold is possible, just so ridiculously infeasible you'd never actually do it. But would that hypothetical, unknowable future have justified an Ancient Greek alchemist saying that transmutation was "in his grasp"? Not even. And on the other hand, alchemists were also looking for the Elixer
The enemies of Democracy are
Fundamentally though, my vision was correct.
Yes, but 20 years ago a computer network was not a hypothetical then-impossible idea. Before the first computer network existed, people understood what technological barriers they would have to overcome to create one, and they already knew how to split a task into multiple parts on separate processing units. It was an engineering problem. It was the engineering problem that your professor was stuck on. Call me when the major obstacle to any of these Futurist predictions is the amount of effort required, not that we fundamentally have no idea how to accomplish the task.
Well I'm not one to say something is impossible, and I am one to listen to an elderly scientist stating that something is possible when they have a scientific reason to think that particular thing is possible. On the other hand, I am also one to scoff dismissively when a Futurist says that something we currently don't have any clue how to do will surely happen because things are happening faster and faster. That's not a scientific reason. Some previously impossible things are now possible. That does not mean that Arbitrary Impossible Thing X will become possible.
The enemies of Democracy are
Clearly you can have a "human mind's worth of computing power" run on only 100W or so. However, it's unclear whether you could run an emulation of a human mind on any reasonable amount of power. Or, for that matter, at all. As yet, there's not the least shred of evidence that either AI or human consciousness transfer is possible.
AI has been 50 years away for 50 years now. Fusion has been 20 years away for 50 years now. I can only conclude that fusion will be a mature, 30-year-old technology, ready to power AIs. :)
Personally, I think that software consciousness will turn out to be quite easy in hindsight, just a matter of learning the trick, but I have no actual evidence for this belief. Has any published futurist ever been right about anything?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Personally, I think that software consciousness will turn out to be quite easy in hindsight,
Agreed. It's going to be an 'everything-and-the-kitchen-sink' kind of problem. Put enough of the right systems together, and it will emerge rather on its own.
The problem isn't going to be creating an artificial intelligence. The problem is going to be in making it an autonomous agent that can be socially integrated into society. Think how long it takes to raise a kid... teaching the kid language, potty training, kindergarten, social skills, job skills, etc... You need to do all of that training with an AI... but it won't necessarily have a body it can move around in and interact with other people with. The first AIs are going to be alien to our experience, unless they're purpose built in android type shells.
I suspect that in 50 years, we'll look back and say 'oh, yeah... the first AIs were waking up 30 years ago, but it took us another 10 years to recognize them for what they were'.
IAACE (I am a Computer Engineer). I agree transistors will not be old news in 20 years, but i think you're looking too broadly. I believe the idea that they will be old news relates to their use in (high performance) computing. It really was from about the 1980's till now, around 20-30 years, for computers to get *really* popular.
Photonic Computing is really in the stage where transistors were in the 60's and 70's. We already have proven concepts and a good idea of where to go so i don't see the statement "it's that transistors will be old news in 20 years; " so completely outrageous.
The only thing i know for certain, is that all our predictions will be wrong.
Agreed.
When it comes to downloading a human consciousness into a machine, I think you are absolutely correct. It's not clear that we will have the capacity of instrumenting and measuring all the variables in the instantaneous state of a brain that makes an individual - you, me, or Ray Kurzweil - and replicate it/convert it to run on a completely different medium. That assertion has more than a bit of "OMG Ponies!" wish fulfilment in it.
When it comes to taking the general intelligence capability of a human and producing a synthetic computer-based analog, it is an engineering problem. First a reverse-engineering problem in determining how the brain does what it does to enable consciousness, and then a process change and die shrink. Neurons are pretty coarse and slow things when it comes to their interconnects and we should be able to do a lot better. With the advantage of faster signal transmission and shorter signal paths, that should give the re-architected "brain" a big speed advantage over our current ones. As for the "software", you could raise the first generation the old-fashioned way in real time (with the processor running at a "degraded speed") for the first few years, and then once you've got consciousness, socialization, and imprinting/attachment to humanity ingrained, let them go into turbo mode for computer-based education. For that first iteration you create as close a model of the human brain as you can, and then you see what simplifying assumptions you can make and still have it work.
The big bottleneck for your virtual scientists at that point will be running physical experiments. Not everything can be gedanken experiments - sometimes you need Large Hadron Colliders that take decades to be built. But for small scale science like molecular biology where a lot can be increasingly simulated? Look out.
Now don't get me wrong, there are some tremendous engineering problems there, with enough intermediate steps that it makes my clustered protein modeling example look like child's play. But it is my reasoned opinion that the project is no less an engineering problem than going from 16 MHz 386's and 10Mb coax Ethernet to 2+GHz quad cores, fiber-based gigabit Ethernet, and middleware for clustered systems with hundreds or thousands of cores.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire